Efrat Fenigson

Efrat Fenigson was the Senior Director of Marketing Communications at Viaccess-Orca. After several years as a computer programmer, Efrat understood her passion is not in creating technology, but rather in creating conversations about it. Previously, Efrat founded and ran the “New Media” sector in the Israeli Export Institute (IEICI), helping hundreds of Israeli start-ups take their first steps in global business.
Efrat blogs about the pay-TV and over the top (OTT) markets, about users' behavior and expectations in today's multi-screen and second-screen reality, and about content protection/piracy.
Efrat holds a BA in Computing from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

Recent Posts

It’s always difficult to know exactly when a new technology is going to break through to mass market adoption, but all the indications are that 2016 will be the year that Virtual Reality moves beyond simply hype to genuine products.

Given the speed with which it has reshaped many industries, including our own media and TV industry, it is fairly astonishing to consider that cloud computing in its modern form is under a decade old. Amazon Web Services announced its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) in August 2006, thus popularising the term and stating that “Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use”; Gartner released its influential report Cloud Computing Confusion Leads to Opportunity in June 2008 and said that cloud computing would become as influential as e-business and in the years since we have travelled to the point where, cloud apps will account for 90% of total mobile data traffic by 2019.

In January 1996, Bill Gates wrote an essay which was published on the Microsoft website, titled “Content is King”. Although the original phrase is attributed to Sumner Redstone, Chairman of the Board of National Amusements, Gates’ following words are a good jumping off point for an examination of how things have changed in the two decades since he wrote them:

The broadcast industry had to adapt to many changes in recent years as it has increasingly embraced IT technologies, but only few had the degree of impact that the cloud is currently having. This is the word ‘change’ written in neon capital letters a mile high; a fundamental change at all levels of business, production and distribution that enables Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, to extend the company’s service to 130 countries — including India with its billion plus people — while making a speech at CES.

In November 2015, the Harvard Business Review published a far-reaching article by David C. Edelman and Marc Singer titled Competing on Customer Journeys that encapsulated well the problems of catching the interest of newly empowered consumers. These, the narrative goes, have become used to mining information resources, abandoning any semblance of brand monogamy in a proactive quest to get the best prices and best services for themselves. Effectively they go on a journey, engaging in an extended consideration and evaluation phase which can lead to a purchase decision or can take them elsewhere.

One of the things we’ve mentioned several times on our blog is the fact that the pace of technological change is accelerating. But perhaps one of the key points we haven’t emphasised enough is that that acceleration is more pronounced in the broadcast industry than it is for many others. Which means that coping with it is that much more difficult

While the growth of OTT subscription services continues to work its transformative powers on business models across the global broadcast industry, attention is starting to turn to the effect that OTT and its associated TV Everywhere paradigm will have on content.

Many industries have embraced advanced marketing strategies in recent years, in order to communicate with their consumers in a way that will match their expectations and will increase their interest, adoption and engagement levels.